Tansu Ciller

Tansu Ciller (24 May 1946-) was Prime Minister of Turkey from 25 June 1993 to 6 March 1996, succeeding Suleyman Demirel and preceding Mesut Yilmaz. She was a member of the conservative Democrat Party of Turkey.

Biography
Tansu Ciller was born in Istanbul, Turkey on 24 May 1946 to a wealthy family, and she studied economics in Istanbul and the Universities of New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Yale. After working for the World Bank she returned to become a professor at the Istanbul elite university of Bogazici. In 1990, she joined Suleyman Demirel's Democrat Party of Turkey, and she became Minister of Economics in 1991. She succeeded DEmirel to become Turkey's first female Prime Minister in 1993, and she presided over some economic growth, while her foreign policy was dominated by an effort to produce greater regional cooperation between Turkey and the other Turkic states of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. Her period in office was marred by the increasing radicalization of the opposition by Islamist groups on one hand and Kuridsh separatist groups on the other. Despite the use of substantial military and police power, she was unable to overcome the latter, while the former won the elections of 1996. Undisturbed by corruption allegations, she formed a coalition with the fundamentalist Welfare Party, with whose leader, Necmettin Erbakan, she was to alternate as Prime Minister. From 1996 to 1997, she served as Deputy Prime Minister, and the Welfare Party-DYP coalition collapsed as a result of the 1997 Turkish military memorandum. After winning less than 10% of the vote in the 2002 general election, Ciller left politics.